PREFACE

What is Zenobia?

Is it a strange place? Is it a prescription? A simple fantasy?

Certainly those seeking a series of straightforward steps to business success would do better to journey elsewhere, for Zenobia is a place of twists and turns, unexpected encounters and surprise. Certainly those who depend on politics and hierarchy to propel their careers to a “higher” place won’t find any of that here.

Zenobia is, instead, for people who recognize that corporate life is very much an adventure—a place where the imagination can open the most extraordinary doors. It’s for people who dare to assert their own best thinking where they work and who dare to let their business environment stir positive change within them.

I’ve spent more than thirty years in business, working my way through its various channels as a sales representative, a marketing manager, and a senior executive. I’ve spent time at established multinationals like Merck & Co., and I’ve had the privilege of helping to launch wholly new organizations such as Astra Merck and EMD Pharmaceuticals. Throughout it all I’ve observed that the people who are most successful at what they do are the ones who embrace the wild rise and fall of the adventure—who find energy in risk, opportunity in the unknown, and possibility in the people all around them. Those who succeed compete with their colleagues, not against them. They view their organizations not as overwhelming, impersonal, implacable forces but as places where they have the chance to influence positive outcomes. They recognize that, while companies are defined by market value, earnings per share, assets, processes, and intellectual property, succeeding rests in the hands of people.

Success is not an absolute measure; it’s the goal each employee sets for himself or herself. Those who succeed name their objectives and then seek out a path—asking for help where they need help, leveraging the expertise of others, and choosing to lead by their own example, no matter where they are “ranked,” no matter how they are titled. Those who succeed are not afraid to bring their true human selves to the job every day—their talents, their anxieties, their pride, their toil, their determination, their humility, their empathy for others, their willingness to take on challenges, assume risks, push beyond known boundaries, and, most importantly, believe in something that is not yet there. Those who succeed aren’t afraid to fail, for failure is only, in the end, a chance to grow and learn.

Adventure stories have the rub of the familiar about them; we read them to our children and we remember having had them read to us. In their pages we meet those rousing heroes and heroines who face scary obstacles and take memorable risks while encountering enemies and finding unexpected allies. We learn again that fears must be overcome if the extraordinary is to be achieved, and by the end of these tales, the extraordinary usually happens. Adventure stories have been told for eons. So why have we failed to apply them to business?

Zenobia:The Curious Book of Business is designed to take you on an adventure—to transport you to a place where even the most crumbling structures and stubborn personalities are transformed by the enthusiasm, conviction, and courage of the story’s heroine. What is strange here will quite quickly become familiar. It will, we hope, inspire you to change the way you view your own world of work—to take what already is and transform it into what must be. For only the creative and the courageous can lead change. Only passion can turn ruin into rightness and transform work itself into something more like fun.

Zenobia is a mythical place, a place where the heroine’s adventure becomes a pathway to success for others. It is, as well, a mystical place—a place that reminds us all that one’s own success can be achieved only when others succeed as well.

Curious indeed.

Matthew Emmens
Wayne, Pennsylvania
January 2008

Now I shall tell of the city of Zenobia, which is wonderful in this fashion: though set on dry terrain it stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging sidewalks, surmounted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes, jutting pulleys, and fish poles, and cranes.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities